The Safety of Others

Interview by SM Editor Noralil Ryan Fores—ShortEnd Magazine Issue 1.15/July 2007

Crafting her debut short film The Safety of Others was perhaps a process much more complex that film director Jenni Tooley expected. Looking through the lens of a disenchanted thirty-something officer worker Dennis, unwilling and unable to reach out to a woman he cares about, the short leans on Tooley’s unshakable senses of compassion, empathy and ultimate sweetness.

The short structure, however, is all but simple, running as it does as one long internal monologue. No matter the filmmaker, the choice is a ballsy move, and one that caused Tooley no little amount of script frustration and revision. Iteration after iteration, the script “evolved into what it wanted to be, which is much more of a conventional piece than I had originally written,” Tooley says. “To a certain extent you control the story, but there’s a point at which you have to let go of it and let it evolve on its own. It definitely told me where it needed to go, even though sometimes I didn’t want to go there with it.”

Adding challenge to challenge, Tooley also grappled with writing from a male perspective, a feat that many women writers shy from in early scripts. "The response I’ve gotten from a lot of guys is, ‘I’ve been there. I know what that is.’ It taught me that there’s a human perspective, which I knew but this verified it for me,” Tooley says. “We’re all interlinked, and that’s important to me.”

In part a story about unrequited love and in part one of self-acceptance, the short dances in experimentation, though primarily its concern is in telling an honest and straight-forward story. Here Tooley speaks about the meanings of her title, working with lead actor Jeffrey Schmidt and first time filmmaking lessons to note.

SM: Now the idea of ‘the safety of others’—I’ve gathered my own ideas about it, but what does that entail for you?

JT: A lot of people come to it from the love story angle, just the story about Dennis and the woman. In that respect, it means for her, “I cannot be with you outside the safety of others.” She can’t trust herself outside of a group. She doesn’t know what she’s capable of feeling or doing. It’s the same thing with Dennis.

For me The Safety of Others is really about Dennis finding himself…What he’s done is he’s buried himself within the safety of these other people so that he doesn’t have to come to terms with his identity, with who he is and the fact that he doesn’t fit in with these people. That’s what it is. ‘The safety of others’—a person burying themselves within a group of other people to escape themselves.

SM: Talking about the character of Dennis, I was hoping that you could talk about casting Jeffrey Schmidt, how that came about and what you were drawn to in his acting.

JT: A few weeks before we went to shoot, (our actor) dropped out. So I had some more casting sessions in New York and a bunch in Dallas. I met Jeff 10 or 15 years ago in Dallas…It didn’t really jump at me, “Oh, I should get Jeff to do this,” immediately. I kept watching the tapes, and I kept thinking, “Jeff’s this guy.”

What attracted me to him is that first off he’s aged beautifully. He’s gorgeous. He’s gorgeous in this way that he’s also awkward. People like him almost as a George Clooney, but at the same time he’s got this Mr. Bean quality, a Rowan Atkinson quality. That’s what I really liked. He fit in with the people. He wasn’t too pretty, but he wasn’t too awkward...I get completely taken in by Jeff’s performance every single time. I get lost in what he’s doing. I think what he does is very subtle and very simple.

SM: With the awkwardness of this character, it’s almost as if it’s a bravado of not fitting in. It went beyond him just not fitting in to a desire not to fit in. I kept thinking, “If Dennis just tried, he could fit in.” There’s a lovely self-reflection and self-absorption to that, but I don’t know if that’s exactly where you meant to come from.

JT: (The woman he is in love with) is the catalyst for this moment in his life where everything just starts to bubble up. All the things that he’s suppressing about himself, that he’s trying to keep under wraps about himself are starting to say, “Hey, I’m here.” He really doesn’t like himself, and he judges himself critically, so he judges everyone else. In a way, that is that bravado that you’re talking about. But, what’s he’s also doing is just starting to accept, “Hey, this is who I am.” That’s really what the story’s about. It doesn’t get to that solution. It’s not resolved, but that’s what he’s moving toward. It’s one of those moments of spiritual awakening that he’s in the middle of, but he hasn’t gotten there yet.

SM: You talked a little bit earlier about the script revision and evolution. I was hoping that you could extrapolate on that.

JT: At the time of the shoot, we sat down and recorded all of the voice-over…Then after we did the production, I brought Jeff in to do another recording because he’d learned so much about the character by actually being the character.

Then I sat down and put a cut together. I sent the cut to (Bruce Richardson), the sound designer, and I sent him the music. I basically placed all the voice-over on one sound line, and he went in, started smoothing it and adjusting it. We worked like that for six months. We got to the Sundance deadline, and I turned in a rough cut. I was like, “You know, this thing doesn’t work.” People hated the character, and it was really important to me that you like Dennis. He’s not a stalker; he not a jerk; he’s just a confused guy. At that point we were coming up on the Slamdance deadline, and I re-cut it again. I sat with (husband Jeremy Schwartz), and we watched it. I knew it was not working, and Jeremy said, “I think you’re going to have to interweave another score with the soundtrack with the voice-over.” At that point, I just started crying. I was like, “I can’t!” I knew what he had told me was what I’d already known, and he just confirmed it. Rather than go find somebody to score it, I just thought, “I’m going to rewrite it.”

It was missing the sense of my quirky-ness and Dennis’ quirky-ness, the softer, more magical side... The poetry was missing out of it. At that point I rewrote it, flew down to Dallas, saw Jeff again, who was so kind to come back into the studio. Bruce, Jeff and I sat down for another six hours. As Jeff worked, I would listen and see what was working coming out of his mouth and what wasn’t, what he was connected to and what he wasn’t. Then I continued rewriting like that as we recorded it. By the end of the day our goal was that we’d have everything plugged in.

I got a copy of it while I was still in Dallas, and I was at a hotel. I had on my little tiny headset—crappy little headset—and I got through the bathroom scene, which had never, ever worked, and tears were rolling down my face. I called Bruce, and I was like, “Oh, my God, it made me cry.” He’s like, “Is that good?”

SM: What is the greatest lesson you’ve learned through all this process, specifically having gone to South By Southwest, AFI Dallas and World Fest?

JT: Get out of the way. Do your work, but don’t have expectations. Do what you need to do to serve the project and the people who worked on the project, but don’t have any expectations of where you are going to end up.

SM: Will you be let down if you create expectations to early, or is it a fear of change?

JT: If you have expectations about how something is supposed to be or something is supposed to go, then what happens is you aren’t actually able to appreciate what does come, whether it’s that big thing you were looking for or a smaller thing that’s happening. You close your eyes to all the other things that are going on and all of the opportunities that you may have.

For more information on the film and upcoming projects, visit www.tooleybox.com.

Editor's Liner Notes: During our interview, I’d asked Jenni how it was that The Safety of Others was produced on a rather limited budget for a short done strictly on film with multiple locations and numerous background players. Along with telling me about to-the-rescue donation of services and the tireless work of Co-Producer Angie Meyer, she added this response to that question later on in an e-mail:

How I do appreciate that question since the typical version of that question is, “You shot a short film on a $25,000 budget? A short not a feature?” But being a self-taught filmmaker, it was important to me that the film was of a high production quality; I had some things to prove. It just happened to be that the short film that I wrote wasn't of the no-budget model. "I think I'll make a short film with three locations (one being a bar) and 40 extras." I knew that that was the amount of money I had to spend to get it there.  I consider it the money I
didn't spend on tuition.

People often ask me how we got the extras; obtaining low-budget background extras is a mystical process.  We needed 40 extras to show up for three consecutive days working crappy hours (3am-3pm).  Here's what we did: this is where it pays to have a good/experienced AD/Co-Producer on board.  We called a casting director and asked her to help out.   For $150, I gave her specs and she pulled about 60-70 people.  I narrowed down to 50.  She contacted them with the info.  We paid $25/day paid on the third day and raffled an iPod shuffle. We also treated them like day players with respect and courtesy.  They ate the same food--I feed crews well-- and hung out in the same holding areas.  I met them all and tried to remember names.  We only lost a couple.  It was an $1800 budget line for a major part of the film.